Your muscles can’t always be balanced

Thomas Myers wrote up a post on symmetry I wanted to expound on a bit.

The more you learn about alleviating joint pain, the more you realize the name of the game typically revolves around symmetry / balance. Balance of muscle length and strength, to be specific. Meaning it’s more likely a joint will feel nice and healthy when all the muscles surrounding that joint are in balance.

Striving for this is an ideal goal and most often the way to feeling better. However, as Myers talks about, perfect balance is not always attainable. Myers gives some examples as to why, mentioning our environments set us up for asymmetry as well as our internal organs. While reading this I had two clients come to mind and thought I’d talk about them and how they support Myers’ argument.

Marilynnis the first example. Marilynn was born with one functioning eye, her left one. Just to be clear, Marilynn can see with her left eye but not with her right eye.

Ok, so if you can imagine only being able to see out of your left eye (put your hand over your right), you can see how you will have full peripheral vision on your left side, but your vision will stop about halfway into the site of your right eye.

Here are a couple drawings I made showing the difference:

Approximately normal peripheral vision with two functioning eyes

Approximate peripheral vision with only left eye

To compensate for her lack of vision out of her right eye, Marilynn walks with her trunk and shoulders rotated to the right. Think of “rotated to the right” akin to the movement you go through when you reach for something behind you to your right.

Not only does she walk like this, she drives like this, sits like this, exercises like this, she basically does everything this way. She does this so instead of having her peripheral vision be unequal between the right and left sides it is now equal:

Approximate peripheral vision with only the left eye working and when trunk and neck are turned towards the right. Notice how the vision is more centered now. It’s not as good as having two functioning eyes but the vision is at least now symmetric between sides

It’s not as broad as with two eyes,

But it’s more centered.

The first thing you may think is, “Hey, what a great compensation. Now Marilynn can see pretty evenly between her eyes. It’s not as good as having two eyes but it’s better than the imbalance she originally had.” While true, this compensation unfortunately sets Marilynn up for musculoskeletal issues. Marilynn is more susceptible to lower back pain (due to the spine being constantly rotated) and shoulder pain than someone without this compensation.

So we clearly have an issue. Correct the trunk rotation at expense of her vision, or leave the trunk rotation at expense of her joints. When it comes to deciding between your vision and your joints it’s clear what wins. Marilynn can do all the corrective exercise she wants but at the end of the day, when she gets in a car she needs to be able to see as much of the road as she can. Not only is symmetry not going to happen, in Marilynn’s case, we do not want it to happen!

We try to keep her as afloat as possible in regards to her pain, and for the most part she is pretty much pain free, but we have to accept Marilynn is always going to be more susceptible to having some issues with her left shoulder and her lower back. Especially considering she is 71 and just realized she does this!

Next example is Sarah. Watch this video and I’m sure you’ll quickly recognize the imbalance:

If you’ve ever wanted to see a classic case of femoral anteversion, there ya go. As you can imagine, having a right hip with that much flexibility, and a left hip with that little flexibility, can cause all sorts of issues in the hips, knees, feet and lower back. The thing is no matter how much we try moving her hip in the opposite direction or try to strengthen her muscles, it’s not going to change that asymmetry much, if at all.

To change this we would need to morph Sarah’s bones into a different position. That’s the only way to have any real effect on that asymmetry. And at the age of 23 (as opposed to say 5), that’s just not likely to happen. An important point here is trying too much to manipulate Sarah’s hip in the opposite direction could actually damage her hip. Bone doesn’t like to be manipulated in this fashion.

Like Marilynn there is work we do to hopefully keep her afloat and as pain free as possible. However, Sarah is always going to be more prone to lower body ailments than someone without that degree of femoral anteversion.

I want to mention when it comes to structural issues such as this, Marilynn and Sarah have to be VERY diligent in how they perform their daily activities. They also need stay on top of their corrective exercise much more than someone without such issues. Because of their abnormalities (sorry guys, it’s true 🙂 ) they are already much closer to reaching their threshold for pain.

Summing up: Correcting imbalances is the primary idea behind getting rid of many different type of muscle and joint pain. However, it’s not always possible, nor advisable, to attain complete balance.

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

I don’t think about only having one eye. I never had to get use to living without one eye. I find that I even get a little help when paralell parking. I’m so unaware about having one eye I use to think that when you had two eyes you saw two of the same thing! I guess one was plenty for me!!!

I have karitonitis that started degrading my right eye at around 11th grade now that im 31 i am nearly blind in my right eye. The degradation hurts but not as much as my back and hip pain …extremely debilitating. Wow never would have thought that my karitonitis is the cause of my daily joint pain on top of my intermitent eye pain. Doctors have not help me or chiro all they have done is taken my money and massaged me without a diagnosis …since im pretty flexible they say im fine but when im in pain u can believe i dont move out of bed because the the horrible pain.